


Notes on the Possession of Marethari

by iodhadh



Series: Notes on Thedas [4]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Demonic Possession, Discussion of Violent Death, Eluvians (Dragon Age), Gen, Manipulation, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-08 05:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19100845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iodhadh/pseuds/iodhadh
Summary: Being extensive theorizing and considerable evidence on the true nature of Marethari's possession by demon, its relation to Merrill's narrative arc, and the resulting consequences thereof.





	Notes on the Possession of Marethari

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything for fandom in nearly a year, so clearly the thing to do is show up with nearly three thousand words of meta about Marethari and then immediately disappear again.
> 
> I've been thinking about this one since somewhere around my second or third playthrough of DA2. I'm now just finishing up my ninth. I've collected up a lot of evidence and I'm pretty firmly convinced of this theory. Maybe you will be too! Enjoy it.

In Dragon Age 2, Merrill’s personal quests follow her attempts to restore the eluvian, and her resulting estrangement from her clan and the tragedy that ensues. It’s the entirety of her narrative, and forms a significant part of her relationship to Hawke. Her story seems to be a sort of cautionary tale: don’t deal too closely with demons or involve yourself in blood magic, or you risk losing everything you care for. But the more I replay DA2, the less convinced I become that the story is as simple as it seems on the surface. What if there’s something else going on behind the scenes? Something Hawke never discovers, that even Merrill doesn’t suspect, that’s hinted at in Varric’s telling of the story without the pieces ever being put together?

Let’s talk about Marethari’s possession.

Marethari’s motives for allowing Merrill’s demonic ally to possess her in act three always seemed a little suspect to me. What she claims is that she’s taking action to spare Merrill from being possessed herself—that this is the demon’s true goal, and she has chosen to save Merrill from that fate. But how logically consistent is that, really? Could Marethari truly have believed the clan wouldn’t retaliate if she forced Merrill to kill her? I don’t think so—especially not after she spent so many years warning the clan about the danger Merrill was putting herself (and them) in. She had to have known the clan would blame Merrill: after all, she ensured it.

And if she knew that, if she expected it, that means she was knowingly causing violent conflict between Merrill and the clan. She was knowingly creating a situation in which one side or the other would very probably die. Why would a clan leader as respected as Marethari, as revered for her wisdom and guidance, put her people into a situation like that? Even if she somehow didn’t see the fight coming, the absolute best case scenario she was creating was one in which she abandoned her clan with no warning and no Keeper (as, since Merrill’s departure, she hasn’t had a First to succeed her). Even just that is hugely irresponsible—and it doesn’t make sense. It’s incredibly ill-thought-out in a way that’s completely at odds with her clan’s perception of her.

Here’s my hypothesis: it wasn’t actually Marethari who said “I allowed myself to be possessed to spare you” before giving in to the demon. It was the demon—having already possessed her against her will, long ago—who claimed Marethari got possessed willingly, in order to make Merrill feel responsible for her death.

I think that the demon was expecting, in the ensuing fight with Merrill and Hawke, that it would be able to fake Marethari’s death and survive unsuspected. Then, when Merrill inevitably had to confront the clan for having killed the Keeper, it was expecting that she—a powerful blood mage aided by the Champion of Kirkwall—would be able to survive against a clan of civilians and hunters. It then planned to use her grief and guilt as a means to possess her, which was its true goal all along: as a demon of Pride, it wanted the best, and Merrill is undoubtedly more powerful than Marethari was. That, in fact, was where the demon’s plan went wrong: it didn’t account for how powerful a mage she truly was, or for Hawke’s true strength, and ultimately it was overcome.

The demon, as Marethari, claims that Merrill had always known that her choices would have consequences; she, Marethari, is simply choosing to pay them for her. But to me, this feels like a smokescreen. Rather than paying for Merrill’s choices, Marethari (or the demon) is taking choices away—that is, taking away Merrill’s choice to potentially sacrifice herself to save her clan.

Given the choice, Merrill would certainly rather have died to save Marethari than lived with the knowledge that she killed her Keeper and either left her clan leaderless or killed them all as well. She even says as much to Fenarel during the confrontation after her fight with the demon. Marethari frames her own death as saving Merrill from consequences, but in actuality she’s forcing her to accept consequences that she never would have chosen for herself. Merrill says when mourning Marethari that it was her decision, and she should have been the one to pay for it if anyone did—and she’s right: not because she’s speaking out of guilt, but because Merrill has always forged her own path and knowingly taken the consequences on herself. She made her choices in full awareness of where they might lead for her, and she deserves to have her agency respected.

But there are other problems with Marethari’s claim that she’s sparing Merrill from her own doom—namely, that there is absolutely no guarantee that Merrill would have been possessed in the first place. Marethari claims that the demon intended to use the eluvian to get to Merrill and thereby possess her, but Merrill couldn’t even get the eluvian working in the first place. And then, even if she had, I very much doubt the demon would have had the power to use the eluvian like that in any case: in the Inquisition quest The Final Piece, when you cross with Morrigan through the eluvian and unexpectedly end up in the Fade, she claims that it would have taken “an immense amount of power” to carve that pathway. In that case, Flemeth (or, more accurately, Mythal) was able to achieve it. But this is an ordinary demon, nowhere close to Mythal’s calibre.

If the demon couldn’t break free of its bindings on Sundermount, how could we reasonably expect it to tear a hole from the Fade to the Crossroads in order to get to Merrill via her eluvian?

The sheer implausibility of the situation seems to me to cast serious doubt on Marethari’s assertion that the demon was inevitably going to possess Merrill via the eluvian. And, as we know, the eluvian is not a mind-altering artifact: it’s a form of travel. Even if the demon did somehow manage to use it to get to Merrill, all that would have done would have been to physically bring it into her presence. To possess her, it would have had to overpower her and outwit her, and Merrill demonstrably has the ability to avoid both. That’s another way that Marethari’s supposed willing possession is logically inconsistent: if she believed Merrill would be able to kill the demon when it was possessing her, a strong mage, shouldn’t Merrill have been equally able to fight and kill it if it came out of the eluvian, when it wouldn’t even have a possessed mage’s power to draw on?

Let’s review Merrill’s established competence. She’s survived in Kirkwall for seven years, as a blood mage, without having been possessed by any of the demons that constantly appear in a city where the Fade is extremely thin; she is canonically demonstrated to be cautious with all spirits, regardless of whether they’re characterized as “good” or “bad” by the mainstream study of magic; she’s canonically one of the only people we know of to deal directly with a demon without being possessed or otherwise falling under its thrall (Solas being the other notable exception, for what should be obvious reasons); she generally demonstrates that she knows what she’s doing in all her interactions with spirits—and she does all this despite being a member of the population that is most statistically vulnerable to possession. I would posit that out of every character we know in Dragon Age, Merrill is possibly one of the most qualified people in Thedas to avoid being possessed. Even if you take her into Feynriel’s dream in act two, the demon there is able to influence her but not possess her; when you talk to her about it afterward, she says it felt like she “had to” believe what it said to her, which suggests to me that the demons in Feynriel’s dream had such a strong effect because they were feeding off a somniari’s power, not because your companions are necessarily weak to demonic influence.

Another issue with Marethari’s claims about the demon is that “risk of possession” was never part of her stated problem with the eluvian in the earlier part of the game. While it’s possible that she was keeping that knowledge from Merrill because she didn’t think Merrill could handle it (she is very patronizing towards Merrill regardless of how one reads this situation), it seems suspect in combination with everything else. It strikes me as more likely that Marethari (the demon possessing Marethari) was instead holding that threat in reserve, in case the rest of its machinations failed.

So, what is it that’s being said earlier?

Marethari claims Merrill is risking bringing back the taint, or harming the clan with blood magic, or otherwise dooming herself in nonspecific ways due to her work with the eluvian. But it’s notable to me that despite what she says, literally none of the dangers or conflicts Merrill deals with come from the eluvian itself. Merrill doesn’t get tainted. She doesn’t get possessed. Using blood magic to purify the mirror never causes her harm. She never accidentally summons a spirit or falls to a spirit’s power. She doesn’t hurt the clan unintentionally—up until they possibly attack her, when she fights them to defend herself.

Instead, everything bad that happens comes as a result of what Marethari did.

Pol runs from Merrill and dies to the varterral not because Merrill harms him in any way, but because Marethari has been filling the clan’s ears with horror stories about her. Marethari dies, and the clan potentially dies, because she reveals herself to be possessed and the clan retaliates against Merrill. Even Merrill’s choice to leave the clan is not a consequence of her having caused any actual harm to anyone in it; it’s because she and Marethari have been arguing so extensively over the eluvian that she feels leaving behind everything she’s ever known would be a better option. Marethari spends seven years driving a wedge between Merrill and the clan, using the eluvian as her reasoning—but the eluvian never actually causes harm at all.

The incident with the varterral in act two is also worth consideration. There’s a throwaway line while you’re running through the cave, where Merrill tells you that normally the varterrals let the Dalish come and go as they please. For this one to be angry and attacking the clan, she says, “something must have provoked it.” It’s never mentioned again, and in the tragedy and upset of Pol’s death, no one stops to ask what the provocation may have been.

Based on what Marethari keeps saying, the obvious conclusion to draw would be that it was provoked by Merrill’s blood magic—but that’s no more logically consistent than any of the rest of Marethari’s implications. Merrill has been practicing blood magic since 9:31, and has been living away from Sundermount for the last four years by the time the varterral becomes a problem. There are lots of blood mages in Kirkwall, and some of them are certainly elves, which was never enough to cause the varterral to attack the clan before. And, as there isn’t anything more “inherently elven” about Dalish elves despite how they may behave on the subject, it can’t be specifically because of Merrill’s blood magic—even if the timing did make sense, which it does not.

But, if we consider the possibility that the Keeper of the nearby Dalish clan was recently possessed… well, that may just have done it.

Merrill mentions more than once—again, largely in throwaway lines—that it’s weird that the clan hasn’t moved on yet. At one point it’s explained by them having lost their halla, which is never expanded on. Later, there isn’t a reason given at all, just Marethari saying she has business on Sundermount, and the clan will move on when it’s time. Their extended stay is never explained—though it’s implied at the end that Marethari is sticking around to allow Merrill to kill her. Members of the clan suggest that Marethari acts in the way she does because she loves Merrill more than she loves the clan, but I don’t buy that; for one thing, Marethari never seems particularly loving in the way she speaks to Merrill, and for another, her reputation as a wise and respected leader doesn’t match with someone who plays obvious favourites, especially to that degree.

But even if the clan legitimately did lose their halla in 9:34 (if it wasn’t, say, a deliberate loss caused by the demon), why hadn’t they already moved on in 9:32, after Hawke’s delivery of Flemeth’s amulet was complete? And even if they still didn’t have halla after 9:34, they must have had some other means of moving on. They could have sent an envoy to another clan asking for rescue, or even made the temporary usage of some horses until they found somewhere safer to camp. Merrill says part of why the Dalish move so often is to avoid notice by the templars—so why are they making excuses to camp out for seven years next to Kirkwall, of all places?

If there really is a legitimate reason for them not to leave, you’d expect it to be addressed in the narrative, beyond offhand background comments. You might even expect there to be a fetch quest offered to Hawke, to help the situation. But there’s nothing.

There’s a banter with Master Ilen in act three, where he tells his apprentice to pack up—they’re leaving with or without the rest of the clan. Other members of the clan make comments about them having been in one place for too long. Marethari is clearly keeping them there well beyond reason, and has been for years. The fact that it’s not addressed and it’s not explained seems very off to me, like a deliberate obfuscation; that members of the clan comment on it and are thinking of leaving without the Keeper’s permission just makes it more so.

I don’t think Marethari was possessed willingly (for the same reasons I explained previously that would make it an irresponsible and uncharacteristic choice), but I do think she likely confronted the demon in an effort to save Merrill from herself. The genuine evidence that something isn’t quite right doesn’t start making an appearance until act two, which suggests to me that it begins around 9:34 or just before. But there are also arguments to be made that it could have started earlier, even as far back as her first appearance, for two main reasons: firstly, I can’t think of any reasonable explanation for why the clan wouldn’t have moved on in the time between 9:31 and 9:34 unless Marethari was keeping them there; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Marethari was making dire pronouncements about the eluvian, and isolating Merrill from the rest of the clan, from the very beginning.

It’s quite believable to me that initially, either before Merrill first contacted the demon or before 9:34, the real Marethari was resistant to her working on the eluvian because it had killed or disappeared two members of her clan. But her early arguments made against it—that it belongs in the past, and should be left there and not allowed to hurt anyone else—have a very different tenor from “it’s not too late to turn back from this path before you doom yourself.”

If my theory is correct and it is a demon puppeting Marethari, then it stands to gain no matter how its schemes are received: either Merrill takes “Marethari” at her word and comes back under her wing, where the demon has easy access to her; or she fights against Marethari’s attempted control, and pushes on down the path that had led her to the demon in the first place—isolating herself from the clan and making it easier for the demon to manipulate both her and them.

So, with all that said: what is the true message of Merrill’s arc in DA2? It is a cautionary tale, but not the one it seems to be on the surface. It isn’t the story of Merrill blindly and stubbornly forging ahead despite all good sense, warning signs, and attempts to save her from herself. It isn’t even really the story of other people having to pay the consequences of her actions for her. Instead it’s the story of everyone—Merrill, Marethari, their whole clan, and even Hawke—being manipulated by a demon that is far craftier than any of them suspect. If there’s any arrogance in Merrill, it’s that: the belief that, because she is clever, and because she knows how to deal with spirits, there’s no way this demon could really be a threat to her. And if there’s any arrogance in Marethari—which I feel there certainly is—it’s her utter conviction that she knows best, and can make Merrill’s choices for her.

But she doesn’t, and she can’t, and that’s where it all falls apart. Marethari can’t find it in herself to treat Merrill as the competent adult she actually is, and for that, a demon destroys both their lives.


End file.
